Finally it happened. After saving for a long time and waiting my time I have finally been able to get the components to build a new PC. It is the first time that I built a computer completely from scratch so it was a bit of an exciting project. Monday the 1st of September I had taken a day off (it was the first day I went back to 8 hour work-days) and Nanette joined me on a tour along 3 different computer stores. I had precisely planned the trip and selected the stores for the best price for all the components, with the obvious risk that any problems I would encounter when building the PC would have to be solved by me.
I had sent MSY an email with an ?Emal and pickup order? as advertised on their website, but even 3 weeks afterwards I have not had any confirmation or reply from them. So I decided to buy most of the stuff from CPL instead (the price difference was minimal anyway). 
First stop was CPL and unfortunately they didn?t have the E8500 CPU that I wanted so I had to move that one back to the MSY shopping list. I did get a Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard, a Canon Lide 90 scanner, a Gigabyte EP45 motherboard, a wireless network card and a TV tuner for the media PC.
Second stop was PCCasegear. This shop is simply fantastic when it comes to PC case?eh.. gear. I bought a really nice case and power supply for the main PC (NZXT Hush), a cute wireless keyboard for the media PC (Logitech DiNovo Mini) and a nice media PC case (Silverstone LS13E
). I had sent these guys an email with my order Thursday before and the entire order was sitting ready for me when I arrived (very nice!).
Final stop was MSY (I don?t like this shop but hey are sooo cheap!). The shop was busy even though it was a Monday morning and we had to wait for a while. Luckily they had everything I needed and they solved one of my issues: do I want my DVD writer to be PATA or SATA: they had run out of SATA so PATA it was. I got the CPU I wanted, 
4Gb of G.Skill PI memory (looks nice!) an AOpen DVD writer (I will be using nice lightscribe discs for our next home DVD?s) a 1Tb Samsung HDD to store our video and photos and a 22? Samsung LCD. The price between DVDR and hard disk?s has gotten so close that it is a waste of time and effort to keep trying to backup stuff to DVD (I have also noticed that DVD?s really are not that reliable as a backup medium). Observant readers might notice that I did not include a graphics card in the kit yet, which is simply because the card I wanted wasn?t for sale at any of these shops! Instead I ordered that card 
(an XPertvision Radeon HD4870 sonic) online and got it delivered two days later at the office. (actually I did get a Radeon 2400 pro at MSY to be used as a secondary GPU, more about this later).
It took me a few days before I got around to start building this stuff because it required taking 3 HDD?s out of our active PC and I didn?t want to cripple that PC too much. First I unpacked the powersupply and the NZXT case and I admired the level of detail on these components compared to the older cases that I?ve had in the past. I was quite nervous about putting all the stuff together because I have had one occasion where I had smoke coming out of a hard disk. 
Wearing nitrile gloves I carefully put the motherboard in the case and I found it surprisingly easy to insert the CPU in it?s socket. Actually it was more like it was placed on a bed of metal springs and then clamped down. The fitting of the cooling fan for the CPU was a bit more difficult because one of the pins holding the fan was didn?t want to stay put at first. The rest of the build went quite smoothly and I was seriously impressed with the size of the GPU. This is one BIG card. I got a bit nervous about the two fans thinking that this might be one very noisy beast, but in the end it?s not too bad. As usual putting all the hard disks into the computer is one of the hardest things since there are so many and they all need their cables, but things were helped by the fact that nowadays with sata it is all a lot smaller and easier to connect. 
During the build I have had several occasions where I was pleasantly surprised by small details where computer design has improved, such as color coding of internal cables, locking clips for the graphics card, the modular design of the PSU so that I could just select the cables that I need and leave the rest out, the tool-less mounting of the HDDs etc etc etc.
The big nervous chills happened when I finally started the beast up; will it burn? will it work? how noisy is it? At first I was disappointed how noisy it was, until a while later I also started up the old computer and found how much more noise that thing makes. After a few weeks of use I have discovered the the most noise is actually generated by my harddrives! Apparently having 5 of those babies in your computer is not a great idea from a noise perspective. It is even so bad that the combination of the drives causes some resonances, but luckily when I switch off the backup drive all becomes quiet again (and I only need to backup drive once a day anyway).
After a few nights of building finally I had come to the stage of installing windows Vista. I had heard a lot of nice stories about it from colleagues so I was keep to give it a go. This computer should be more than powerful enough to run Vista so let?s go! The installation was quite easy (I just popped in the DVD and started cooking dinner while the kids were playing) and at the end of the installation I encountered a very old familiar feeling: Several parts in the computer didn?t work because vista didn?t recognize them! I have gotten used to having an operating system that is much newer than the hardware, so that everything works from the get-go, but not this time. The hardware in this computer is much newer than vista so I needed to install several drivers (which was quickly done) and then the party could get started! One of the first things I tried was a game that didn?t ran good on the old machine at all : Company of Heroes; I was stunned. This computer runs the game at maximum detail with no problem at all! Completely smooth and it looks tons better than before. ME LIKE! Following that first gaming excursion I spent a bit of time getting to know Vista and I must say:I like Vista! I like the bling that you get with Vista, I like how it makes things a bit more accessible and how it makes things look, I like how things are organised, it just left a good impression on me. It probably helps that I installed it on a computer that has the resources to deal with Vista, but that?s not the point 
Since I was getting a larger LCD screen (really getting frustrated having all these large screens at work but not at home) I had to decide what to do with one of the smaller screens that we had been using up to now. At the last moment I decided to put a small and cheap extra GPU into the machine to run the extra screen so that I could run 3 monitors of one computer, and it works! It took no effort at all, it was recognized without problem and it runs like a charm! There is now so much space on the desktop that it?s almost hard to figure out what to put on each desktop! GREAT!
One after the new computer had been running for nearly 2 weeks I got myself to rebuilding the old PC into a media PC. It was a bumpy ride putting the stuff into the media PC case since the things didn?t quite fit the way I had planned, but eventually it was running and the PC started up with the operating system that had been on it when it was still in the other case with 2 additions: a wireless network card (the TV is too far from the router) and a TV tuner. Unfortunately I could not get the TV tuner to work at all; any attempt to start the software that came with that card resulted in the software crashing so apparently there is a bit more work to do on that. I have tried to swap the card for a different brand but since it was several weeks since I bought it the shop didn?t want to exchange it anymore.
A fresh install of windows (Media Center Edition) solved the issue and everything started working. I quickly found that Windows MCE is simple to set up but it is very hard to get it working the way I want it (for instance it could not detect 2 of the TV channels that we receive here) . Therefore I decied to try one of the other Media-Center options out there: Mediaportal. This software is slightly harder to set up (not much) but it is SOOOOOO much more flexible to change it to behave the way I want. The downside to that is that it takes quite a bit of time to finetune and fiddle with everything until it works to my liking. A few of the nice options I’ve found so far:
- When watching TV you can pause the TV at any time and resume where you stopped it when you want, so there is no need to specifically record it.
- When watching a recorded TV program it is possible to turn subtitles on and off as if you are watching TV normally.
- Pressing record on the remote control pops up a request asking if you want to record ‘this program’ or just manually want to use the recorder. When selecting ‘this program’ it automatically schedules the recorder to stop recording a predefined time after the program ends.
- Mediaportal has a plug-in to play TV programs from the website “Uitzendinggemist.nl” which contains Dutch TV programs, so we can now watch programs from the Neterlands straight of the internet. The internet connection to the Netherlands isn’t very good so it’s not great but the idea is nice.
It is VERY easy to play something for the kids’ on the PC. No need to hunt for a DVD or anything, just show the pictures of the series and the kids pick what they want.
- The Logitech DiNovo Mini keyboard is GREAT! It is such a cute little keyboard, and it’s just fantastic having the ability to control everything on the PC when needed without it feeling more bulky than a normal remote control.
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